The Fourth Watcher (24 page)

T
he mask is clear plastic, more terrible because it hides nothing. It cups Arthit's nose, his slack mouth, and his chin. A transparent tube runs into it, supplying oxygen; one of the medical technicians had carefully stubbed out his cigarette before turning the valve on the tank he had wheeled up behind him. The banging of the tank against the stairs is the first sound Rafferty can remember since the shot from Ming Li's gun that put the Korean down. The ten or twelve minutes between the time he saw Arthit sprawled on the hallway floor and the bumpy progress of the tank up the stairs seem to have passed in complete silence.

Rafferty, collapsed heavily on the couch, can't look at Arthit's paper-white face, can't look at the mask. A pink froth of blood speckles the inner surface. It looks like Arthit chewed a pencil eraser and spit it out.

“The lung,” says the medical tech who is holding the mask in place. He lifts one of Arthit's eyelids, peers under it, and lets it drop. “The bullet hit the lung. Probably took a bounce off a rib. No exit wound,
so it's still in there somewhere. Maybe a .22, not enough velocity for a pass-through.”

To Rafferty it seems that the tech is speaking very slowly. Everything that is happening in the tight knot of people gathered around Arthit seems to take an excruciatingly long time. He lowers his eyes again until he is looking at the suitcase between his knees. The suitcase is safe to look at.

From Rafferty's left, the older cop, Kosit, says, “It's a .22.” Kosit has the Korean's gun wrapped in a handkerchief.

Rafferty knows he has to get up, knows he and Ming Li and Leung have to get out of there, but he can't make himself move. Arthit going down; Arthit hitting the floor; the blood on Arthit's shirt…

“What about him?” asks the other tech, thumbing the Korean, trussed and bleeding on the floor in front of the couch.

“Fuck him,” says the first tech. “Let the second team—”

“Blood pressure dropping,” says the second tech. His voice is tight.

“Up and out,” the first tech says. “Now.” The two techs and their helpers lift the stretcher and carry it down the hall, moving fast. Rafferty hears their feet on the stairs, synchronized with the flashes of red on the ceiling, thrown by the lights on the ambulance below.

He feels the young cop's eyes on him. “I saw what you did,” the young cop says. “I saw you take the money.”

“I did…I did what Arthit would have done,” Rafferty says. In fact, he can barely remember his frenzied rush through the apartment, fueled by sheer terror at the thought of Arthit's dying. He couldn't help Arthit, but he had to do
something.
What he recalls is a blur of motion, punctuated by full-stop images: a closet filled waist-high with neatly stacked brand-new counterfeit bills, a canvas bag stuffed with loose money, dirty and well handled, a big hard-sided suitcase under the bed. He and Leung jamming money into the suitcase, Leung grabbing the canvas bag. But now that energy is gone. Now there's nothing except the apartment, the sound of the men rushing downstairs, and the weight of his own body. He can't lift his head to meet the cop's stare. He remains focused on the suitcase and, beyond it, the bare feet of the wounded Korean. If he raises his eyes, he'll see the broad smears of blood on the front of Ming Li's white blouse, as though someone had wiped a paintbrush across it.

Arthit's blood.

“You can't just steal—” the young cop begins.

Kosit says, “Stop it. Just shut up.”

“You saw us together,” Rafferty says to the younger cop. He can barely form the words. “We're friends. We did this together. I did what he would have wanted me to do.”

“It's true,” Kosit says. “Arthit talked about him all the time. They were friends.”

“We
are
friends,” Rafferty says sharply. “He's not dead.”

No one replies. Kosit studies the floor.

“Oh, dear sweet God,” Rafferty hears himself say.

“We have to go,” Leung says from the window. “More cops will be coming.”

“Coming?”
Kosit says. “They should be here by now.”

Rafferty says, to no one in particular, “I'm not sure I can stand up.”

“Yes you can.” Ming Li is standing in front of him, although he isn't aware of her having crossed the room. “You have to.”

“What you have to do is get out of here,” Kosit says. “You're just going to make things more complicated. Arthit is the only one who can explain why you were here in the first place. Not to mention why you're with a couple of Chinese.” He goes to the doorway and looks down the hall. “If my colleagues find you here, they'll take you all in. I'm not sure even Arthit could get you out of it. Even if Arthit…” The words hang unfinished.

“Listen to him, Poke,” Ming Li says. “If they arrest you, if you're not there to meet Chu at five-thirty, your wife and daughter will die. I promise you. He'll kill them.”

Kosit turns back to the room. “Whatever this is about, get moving. And use the back door. We called in more than ten minutes ago. They'll be here any second.” He fumbles in his pocket and comes out with a card, which he extends to Leung. “Give this to him. It's got my name and number. You,” he says to Rafferty. “Wake up. Do what you're supposed to do. You can call me later about Arthit, about how he's doing.”

“Poke,” Ming Li says. She bends down, bringing her face to his. He feels the warmth of her breath. “One thing at a time, remember? Right now we need to go. The only thing that matters is getting out of here.
You can't help Arthit now.” He feels her hands on his arm, feels the strength flowing from them, and somehow he finds himself on his feet. Leung has come from nowhere to grasp his other arm, and Rafferty hears a grunt as Leung lifts the suitcase with his free hand. Ming Li has picked up the canvas bag. Propelled between them, Rafferty sees the straight lines of the door grow nearer, as though the wall were coming toward him in some amusement-park mystery house, and then the hallway slides past and he is on the stairs, the world tilting downward. Leung moves in front of him to catch him if he falls.

Outside, car doors closing, men's voices.

“Faster,” Ming Li says, and then they're through the back door.

Rain slaps Rafferty in the face. His eyes sting.

Two steps lead down to a small garden: broad-leaved palms whipping around in the wind, tall ferns blown almost flat against the ground, black water standing a few inches deep. In one corner the spirit house, made of rough wood, has toppled over. The garden ends in a low, unpainted wooden gate, and beyond and above it there's a streetlight, a yellow flame in a halo of rain.

“Don't move,” Leung says. He drops the suitcase in front of them and goes through the gate without a backward glance. The gate squeals open into a narrow alley and then is blown shut. In seconds, Leung is invisible, a shadow wrapped in rain.

“Are you here, Poke?” Ming Li asks. Her hair clings to her face in long tendrils. “We need you to be here.”

He lifts his face to the rain, lets it needle his eyelids and cheeks. “I'm here.”

“Hate,”
Ming Li says. She pinches his arm and gives the pinch a twist. “What you need is hate. Hate will keep you moving.”

“I've got enough hate for that,” Rafferty says.

“Good. Hang on to it. Feed it. Hate got us out of China. It'll get your wife and little girl back.”

“And Arthit's wife,” Rafferty says raggedly. “
Noi.
He'll want…he'll want her near him.”

“He'll have her,” Ming Li says. She lets go of his arm and steps back, searching his face. “By the time he opens his eyes, he'll have her.”

Rafferty wraps his arms around her and hauls her so close that he can feel her spine pop. She stiffens, and then her arms go around him
and they stand there, hugging each other, as the rain pours down on them. Ming Li says, “It's all right, older brother,” and something dark blooms in Rafferty's chest, spreads long, soft wings, and then seems to vaporize and disappear, escaping into the night on an endless breath.

“Okay,” he says, releasing her. Her gaze locks with his, and the muscles beneath her eyes tighten in recognition. She takes a step away, turns her head to look at him again.

“Let's move,” he says. “We've got people to kill.”

 

THE PLAINCLOTHES COP'S
tuk-tuk,
which Leung has borrowed without asking, makes an uneven popping sound, one of its cylinders misfiring occasionally, as it threads through the rain-slowed traffic on Silom. The water falls in sheets, the windshield wipers sluggish with the sheer weight of it. Rafferty and Ming Li sit side by side in the back. Ming Li holds on her lap the canvas bag full of older, well-used money, and Rafferty squeezes the big suitcase between his knees.

Rafferty has no way of knowing how long they've been traveling: It could have been ten minutes or ten hours. He seems to have been journeying through some internal space, the space between thoughts. The space between gunshots. He feels vast and icily empty inside, but he is intensely aware of the mass of his body as it presses against the seat, of the touch of Ming Li's thigh against his, of the cold wetness on his skin. The hardness of the suitcase, the contents of which Arthit may have died for.

“We're almost there,” Ming Li says.

Rafferty shakes himself, the way he sometimes does when he wakes from a dream gone wrong. A dream Rose would want to hear every detail of, looking for the scraps of meaning that might help them avert disaster. The movement brings him back to himself, in a
tuk-tuk,
on a wet night, next to his new sister, in a world where disaster has already struck. He leans down to peer beneath the
tuk-tuk'
s sloping roof. “Twice around,” he says. “I need to see if we've got watchers.”

“No one following!” Leung shouts over his shoulder.

“That's not going to help if they're already here. Do the block twice, like I said.”

“What now?” Ming Li says as Leung makes the turn.

“What now? Damned if I know.” His eyes are on the sidewalks. “But I think you should drop me and then get back to Frank. Talk it over with him, see what you come up with. What I've got barely qualifies as an idea.”

“Fine,” Ming Li says. “We'll call you in a couple of hours.”

“Chu's not going to give me any more time. Whatever the hell we're doing, we need to be ready.”

“We've been ready for years,” Ming Li says. “Now we're down to details.”

Rafferty says, “Frank did a good job with you.”

“He did some of it,” Ming Li says, watching the other sidewalk. “Some of it is talent.”

 

THE MONEY HE
grabbed from the closet and packed into the suitcase is stiff as starch, the greens and browns too green and brown, the whites too white, the paper too clean. It stacks in perfect rectangular towers, each bill flat enough to have been ironed.

In a quantity this large, it wouldn't fool a blind man.

On the other hand, the money jammed into the canvas bag is soft, worn, dog-eared, soiled from use. The oil and grime from a thousand hands have given it a smudged patina like a layer of dirt on an old painting. It's seen wallets, purses, bar spills, hot coffee, knife fights, crowded cash drawers. It smells of sweat and dirt and face powder. It has notes written on it: phone numbers, prayers, aimless chains of obscenity. It's been exchanged for drinks, drugs, food, a dry room, a doctor's care, sex, a lover's gift, perhaps a murder or two. Hearts have been drawn here and there, stick figures, arrows, candles, teardrops, interlinking squares, the marginalia of idle minds.

In short, Rafferty thinks, it's
money.
The stuff in the suitcase is printing.

The new bills in the suitcase are what the Korean was circulating. The bills in the canvas bag were taken from the banks by the tellers and then passed on in those manila envelopes.

Rafferty keeps seeing Arthit's face, the colorlessness of Arthit's face.

Halfway through a distracted count, he heaves a stack of bills across
the room. They separate and flutter to the floor, covering the carpet and the coffee table. A wad with a rubber band around it lands on the hassock. He stares at it. It's real money, taken from the envelopes the Korean grabbed from the tellers, and the rubber band compresses it in the center, leaving the ends loose and soft. It looks almost…fluffy.

The paper-banded stacks of counterfeit look like bricks.

He thinks,
Fluffy.

The word galvanizes him. This is something he believes he knows how to do. And then, in an instant, he sees the rest of it, or at least a possible sequence, as though, during the hour or more of paralysis, it's been quietly assembling itself, waiting for him to notice. For a moment he sits perfectly still, staring at the money and seeing none of it, trying to sequence the stepping-stones that might lead them out of this cataclysm. Looking for the surprise, the wrong turn, the ankle breaker, the gate that won't open, the twig that will snap in the night, the stone that's poised over a hole a hundred feet deep.

He knows he can't see it all. So small steps first. Things he knows how to do.

He goes to the kitchen and checks the cabinet beneath the sink, where they keep the laundry supplies. Straightening up, he realizes that the sound he just heard was his own laughter. He leaves the cabinet yawning open and goes to the living-room desk, where he takes Rose's phone book out of the drawer she uses. He finds the numbers he wants and makes four short calls.

When he leaves the apartment, he leaves the door ajar. His helpers may arrive before he returns.